Farming fun:

About the time when old Clifford Sifton was lighting a fire under Ottawa’s politicians to settle the west before the Americans did it for them, the advertising agencies of the day hyped it up to make migration into western Canada very attractive. 

They painted western Canada as a land of milk and honey and abundant wheat crops with all kinds of space for mega-ranching and cattle herding. Ads and posters showed spectacular four-colour scenes from prairie skies to majestic Rockies, all aimed at firing up the imaginations of land-hungry immigrants.

As we westerners already know, we’re here because our grandparents were among all those who took the bait. It worked not only on East European would-be land barons and cattle kings, but also on many members of the West European gentry, some of them with the means to properly finance such dreams.

Manor houses and country clubs ready to service upscale communities were initiated in a few choice locations. This was not exactly par for the course with the average homesteaders who arrived with nothing more than big dreams and hand tools to dig, clear bush and build very basic sod shelters for the family. 

Since railway tracks were necessary to access produce everywhere the homesteads went, many looked for work laying track to earn money to buy oxen and horses.

The British gentry who thought they could carry on their upscale lifestyle with saddle horses, fox hounds, rare vintages and polo ponies in the vast expanses of the new land did not anticipate what they would encounter by way of climatic conditions. 

They failed to consider that there was no warm Gulf Stream current moderating temperatures on the bald Prairie. It took only one or two winter seasons to inspire many of them to gather up whatever belongings were portable and scurry back to the familiar neighbourhoods of the old country.

Most of them did not hang around long enough to realize the full potential of the new lands overseas. In order to do that, it was necessary for the newcomers to have a fertile imagination and enough motivation to stay put and tough it out.

Those who stayed were generally too busy to do all of the things they wanted to do. Priorities included the need to establish schools, churches, Postal service, organize municipal government and do everything necessary to build functional communities. That was what my grandpa Casimir Bielecki had to do, and he did all those things successfully. 

His sons, Carl, Steve, John and Joe had more time at their discretion to do the things Casimir had little time for, but the onset of the Great Depression brought their rapidly evolving lifestyle to an untimely recess as credit dried up and prices for farm produce hit rock bottom. 

My father, Steve, sold a cow for $5–-that’s one whole cow, not a cheap cut of meat. He shipped a train carload of barley to the Lakehead terminals, took a $100 deposit and was informed a week later that he owed for the delivery.

That's how Generations 1 and 2 fared. We are members of Generation 3, our children Generation 4, and so on. As the years drift by, memories of our friends and relations tend to become more refined as the experience of years snaps past events into clearer focus.

Memories have a way to become more enhanced and some of my favorites are those of my father’s youngest brother, my uncle Joe. That is because Joe Bielecki is the uncle I interacted with more than with the others over the years. 

Uncle Joe liked to read and he recognized my own need to read and my interest in things technological. He passed on his mechanical magazines to me after he had read his fill. These included Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, Science and Mechanics and Mechanix Illustrated. He picked these up at one of the stores in Tiny, SK, a nearby CN whistle stop with about three grain elevator companies doing business with the local farmers. 

Stores in Tiny at that time were operated by Gushulak and Cymbalisty. They were there to serve the farmers who hauled their grain to the elevators and picked up their groceries and dry goods on the way home. 

While all stores were general in nature, these small country shops were the convenience stores of their day. The real stores, both department and otherwise, were in Canora, the nearby rail centre.

When the railways were built, these little whistle stops with grain elevators sprang up about every ten miles, just far enough apart to accommodate farmers hauling a double or triple box wagon load of grain pulled by a pair of draft horses. The one at Tiny was within comfortable distance by bicycle for uncle Joe to do his magazine and book shopping.

This was the late ‘30s and early ‘40s when people were still coping with the results of the Great Depression which cut off credit and wiped out a significant portion of the gains the early pioneer farmers had made. It became necessary for them to give up their tractors and Model Ts to fall back into survival mode with horses and buggies. 

Being forced to abandon his Titan tractor, uncle Carl, the eldest brother in the family, took to raising beautiful Clydesdale draft horses with reddish fur, blonde manes and feathery pasterns on their oversize hooves that made them look as though they were forever wearing their heavy winter boots.

Uncle Joe took another route. He started raising Hackneys. That’s the fancy high-stepping horses the queen uses to tow her ornate, gold-trimmed carriage on state occasions. While he had no gold-trimmed carriage, Uncle Joe was nevertheless going to travel in style.

He acquired a pure-bred champion stud, Black Diamond, to sire his herd. Beautiful horse. His services were in much demand among local farmers. When Uncle Joe rented out the stud’s services, somehow the word got around and the local farmers gathered to watch the nuptials. 

Why, is anybody’s guess, but a good theory is that the horses’ reproductive equipment, both male and female, resembles closely the human equivalent, only larger, and the farmers at that time had no high-definition big screen TV nor portable telephones to inject a little diversion into their spare moments.

Uncle Joe took his status as a gentleman farmer seriously. Besides raising Hackneys, he also had a wide variety of pigeons, including rollers, tumblers, homers, fantails, and probably spinners, or whirlers, etc. His only problem with these was the Peregrine falcons, whose favorite prey is doves, close relatives of the pigeons. 

In time, the pigeons learned that a good way to avoid the falcons’ attacks was to dive for the earth and start walking. The falcons evolved to attack in the air and didn’t know what to do with a bird that chose to walk, so they landed and walked along behind, in the hope that their intended dinner would decide to take off.

On more than one occasion on the way to or from school, we kids amused ourselves watching pigeons walking across the black summer fallow fields with a hungry peregrine marching along behind in lockstep.

On winter weekends, when the snow in nearby fields was just right, Uncle Joe would come and pick me up driving a fast team of Hackneys hitched to an articulated sleigh with a two-level box. Concealed within the box, crouched on a layer of straw, were three dogs: Smokey, a tall greyhound, and two smaller, not so swift, but much more deadly pit bulls.

If the snow layer was no deeper than a foot or so, and temperature not too low, we would head out across the fields until we spotted a coyote. That seldom took longer than a few minutes and at that point, Uncle Joe would prompt Smokey to have a peek. 

The huge hound would raise his head over the level of the box and scan the indicated scene. When he spotted the coyote–-usually a black dot on the snowy horizon–-he would bound out of the sleigh box and take off in a straight line for the coyote.

With Smokey well on his way, uncle Joe turned the two killers loose and they scrambled out of the box and immediately fanned out, one to either side of the hound’s trajectory. This worked well when the coyote decided to turn either one way or the other, in which case one of the pit bulls would be upon him in short order.

Hiyaah! The Hackneys would accelerate into a galloping mode and take off in the same general direction. We’d grab onto some solid part of the sleigh box and hang on. The chase was on!

Smokey’s bounds were a measured 22 ft between touchdowns, so he covered a lot of distance and closed on the unfortunate coyote in short order. The big hound was not a killer. He would simply overtake the coyote and knock him off his stride. As the coyote turned to defend himself, the killers would be upon him. The end was quick and merciless. One less coyote for the farmers to worry about.

This is not exactly the type of fox hunting the Brits expected to be engaged in, with a couple of dozen baying Beagles harassing a fox, but it was damned efficient and useful to the farmers who tried to raise livestock and poultry without having to share with the local predators.

And it was fun. Bloody, but fun. Something to do which I appreciated during my high school years. I spent parts of the occasional weekend with Uncle Joe and the memories that were generated survive to this day.

Smokey provided plenty of action. Uncle Joe told me about one occasion when the hound took off on his own and tackled a wolf and came back needing some patching up. Another time, the adventurous hound took off all by himself to tackle a coyote which turned out to be an amorous female and wound up coming home much later with a smile on his face, but looking quite apologetic for his impulsive behavior.

We speculated that it is entirely possible that somewhere in that part of the prairies is a sub species of extremely tall coyotes that can outrun a dirt bike.

It ought to be quite obvious that Joe Bielecki was a man with a lively imagination who did what he could to realize the full potential of what life had to offer in Canada’s early west. He was a fun guy and I was lucky enough to share some of his activities with him.

His mechanical magazines had a hand in shaping my future, as well. When, years later, I joined the business press division at MacLean Hunter in Toronto, I found immediate success as editor of Canadian Automotive Trade Magazine, Automotive Service Data Book and the Car Life section in Maclean’s Magazine.

I wound up my writing career doing technology articles, some international award winners among them.